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Community, Current Events, Grief, Practice News

https://erbgood.com/tribute/details/15465/Gloria-Taylor/obituary.html

The psychotherapy community just lost one of its best. More personally, I just lost my own therapist of twenty years. Most importantly, if there’s one person I can point to as a guiding light for everything I have become in the past two decades, it was Gloria.

I had already been her client for seven years, through one relationship and into my then-marriage, when I walked into her office on 7 Willow Street in Waterloo and asked, “If I wanted to do what you do for a living, how do I get from here to there?”. It was Gloria who talked me into the Master of Theological Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University’s adjunct Waterloo Lutheran Seminary. I balked at the “seminary” part initially, but a chance to actually work with Gloria in her capacity as the instructor of the Family of Origins course proved an extremely powerful lure. And frankly, the Seminary itself proved to be the best possible place to go for a lot of reasons I’ll cover some other time. So Gloria became not only my therapist but also a teacher and mentor. Teaching how to navigate and reframe and unpack family of origin mysteries was only one of her many gifts to me and other students. I regret now never having had the opportunity to take one of her Mastery courses while she was still leading them, but what she taught me — not just in that class but over the course of twenty years of great patience as my therapist — is material that I use every day of my life now.

Gloria is the reason I became a therapist. The ways in which she helped me unravel and reknit parts of myself were a form of serious magic that I wanted to understand, and more, to practice as she did. We both came into this field as a midlife career change, and more than anything else, that showed me that what she could do was within my reach. Grad school, private practice, the slow transition out of my old career, facing the personal travails of that transition, finally getting grounded, and eventually having enough professional cred to land the position at Bliss Counselling… all of this is a testament to everything Gloria taught me, and everything she modelled for me in our own conversations.

She’s the reason I’ve now written a number of letters of recommendation for my own clients as they apply to the same program I did. She’s the reason I also became a supervisor of students and qualifying psychotherapists. She nurtured and encouraged my aspirations; it behooves me to continue that circle onto the next generations who follow and pay forward the many great gifts she shared with me.

A month and a half ago, Bliss Counselling moved into that building at 7 Willow Street in uptown Waterloo. As soon as I heard the new address, I emailed Gloria to tell her the news; she laughed at the circle completing itself in new and interesting ways. “That’s just wild,” she said. I had meant to ask about appointments at that time but forgot; I know now she wouldn’t have been in any condition to work and had actually FINALLY retired for real. A couple of weeks ago, I sat in what had been Gloria’s office when I started seeing her. That evening, I wrote,

20 (or 21) years ago, I walked into the second-story corner office at 7 Willow Street. I sat in one of the chairs under the east windows; I never really thought about why I never sat on the sofa on the opposite wall. The chair and the desk along the south wall were clearly where The Therapist sat. And there she sat, the terrifying authority who was obviously going to tell me everything that was wrong with me/us/our relationship/our lives. It was one of the most frightening experiences of my adult life, frankly.

Today I walked into that very same second-story corner office, and for the very first time, I sat in the chair by the desk along the south wall. Different chair, different desk, but… this is clearly still where The Therapist sits. Only now The Therapist is -me-, 20 (or 21) years and a whole lifetime different from the woman who sat first in the chair under the window feeling terrified. And the young woman sitting today on the sofa that is now under the windows is herself the NEXT generation of therapists, although she already knows it whereas I had NO clue.

If there is a word for this feeling, I surely do not know what it might be.

Yesterday a friend who was also a client of Gloria’s messaged me to ask for help in finding a new therapist; that was the first word I had that things had gone as far for Gloria as they were going to go. I immediately sent her my own email yesterday to touch base and say thank you, but I absolutely doubt she will have received it, given… everything. My greatest hope is that somehow Gloria knew how many lives she touched, how many she helped reframe, rekindle, rebuild. Clients, students, the “baby therapists” she supervised, the Marriage & Family Therapists she mentored and guided through AAMFT, the many people who took her Mastery courses over the years to discover themselves–no-one ever seemed to walk away from Gloria without the seeds of change implanted in their minds.

My heart goes out to her family, who thankfully had the chance to be with her in whatever ways they could be when she went out by her own choice with medical assistance in dying (MAID). That’s absolutely Gloria, right to the very end. Her daughter Dawne shared a photo of Gloria in her last moments, and I agree with Dawn 200% — all I see is the beauty that was Gloria.

Photo courtesy Dawne Taylor-Gilders

Goodbye, Gloria. I’ll do my best to live up to that legacy you’re leaving behind.

Book Recommendations, Community, Current Events, Emotional Intelligence

November 2015, Bataclan Theatre, Paris: a terrorist attack kills 89, including the wife of Antoine Leiris. Leiris later wrote something in a Facebook post that has become a manifesto to many who struggle with responding to this kind of attack on our basic humanity:

“So, no, I will not give you the satisfaction of hating you. That is what you want, but to respond to your hate with anger would be to yield to the same ignorance that made you what you are. You want me to be scared, to see my fellow citizens through suspicious eyes, to sacrifice my freedom for security. You have failed. I will not change.”

July 2016, Nice, France: “a 19 tonne cargo truck was deliberately driven into crowds of people celebrating Bastille Day on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, France, resulting in the deaths of 86 people[2] and the injury of 458 others.”

April 2018, Toronto Ontario: a man drove a van into pedestrians along a busy city street, killing ten and wounding 15 more. When police apprehended him shortly thereafter, he purportedly approached them, saying “Kill me.” Police refused to shoot, subduing and arresting him without further harm.

We think, “This is Canada; this isn’t supposed to happen here.”

I’ve recently been reading Bren? Brown’s latest book, “Braving the Wilderness”; it was there I first hear about Leiris and his anti-hate manifesto. She explores the experience of connection and disconnection in human relations, including the ways in which we find it easier to hate amorphous groups far more easily than we can hate individuals; how the quest for true inclusion leaves us grappling with profound fears of being or feeling excluded, and how those fears can be manipulated into creating the false dichotomy of “us versus them”, or moral exclusion.

Moral exclusion as a broad-scale social phenomenon is the basis for a variety of dehumanizing practices, in which dehumanization is “the psychological process of demonizing the enemy, making them seem less than human and hence not worthy of human treatment.” (Brown 2017, pg 72)

“Groups targeted based on their identity–gender [or orientation–KG], ideology, skin colour, ethnicity, religion, age–are depicted as “less than” or criminal or even evil. The targeted group eventually falls out of the scope of who is naturally protected by our moral code. This is moral exclusion, and dehumanization is at its core.” (Brown 2017, pg. 73)

The rhetoric that has been building south of the border since well before the last presidential election has opened the door to see this “us versus them” in harsh detail. Arguably it truly launched after 9/11 provided the US with a solid platform to vilify “Muslim terrorists”, conflating an entire culture with its most ardent and evangelical outliers and dehumanizing them all. More crucially, we’ve seen how infectious that kind of thinking is as we’ve watched it creep north of the border; we’re watching it reignite as we move into another election year of our own.

There’s always an “Us” ready to hate “Them”.

As soon as news of the van attack hit the feeds yesterday, those sides polarized, even here among the “polite Canadians”. The association of the driver (male, light-skinned) with a movement that has become tied to angry entitlement and the alt-right men’s movement has been constant fodder as people try to make sense of the senseless, try to manage their fears with information that (in theory) will explain everything. As nature abhors a vacuum, so too does the human mind abhor not having answers to, or neatly-contextualizing information explaining, major emotional experiences. We process our shock, and fear–and yes, anger–together, but in that togetherness, the polarization seems to occur seamlessly. And we want nothing more than to be on “the right side” in choosing our responses to such an event.

“Common enemy intimacy is counterfeit connection and the opposite of true belonging. If the bond we share with others is simply that we hate the same people, the intimacy we experience is often intense, immediately gratifying, and an easy way to discharge outrage and pain. It is not, however, fuel for real connection. It’s fuel that runs hot, burns fast, and leaves a trail of polluted emotion. And if we live with any level of self-awareness, it’s also the kind of intimacy that leaves us with the intense regrets of an integrity hangover. […] I get that these are uncertain and threatening times. I often feel the pull of hiding out and finding safety with a crew. But it’s not working.” (Brown 2017, pg. 136)

I made the #1 Internet Citizen mistake yesterday as the news was breaking: I read the comments. Even on reputable news sources, the rampant hatred of some respondents was an unavoidable thread among the otherwise-fulsome outpouring of love, shock, support, condolences, sadness. The ideological camps were staking out their territories in UsandThemism language of anger and hatred.

Since the above sections of Bren? Brown’s book were still fresh in my mind, I kept coming back to Leiris’ letter to the Bataclan attackers:

“Of course I am devastated by grief, I grant you this little victory, but it will be short-term. I know she will accompany us every day and we will find ourselves in this paradise of free souls to which you will never have access. […] [W]e are stronger than all the armies in the world.”

As a woman, as a feminist, as someone who has experienced rampant misogyny on personal and professional levels nearly all my life, it would be so terribly, terribly simple to buy into that hate, to dehumanize Yet One More Violent Man as part of that more anonymous collective. There’s a seductive truth underlying most of our UsAndThemism: there are more than enough individual examples of anything we collectively hate to justify assuming there’s a systemic problem encompassing a LOT of individuals into some kind of cohesive larger unit. So we come to hate what we assume to be a cohesive collective, and forget (or choose not) to see the individuals within that presumed collective. We have effectively dehumanized them.

Brown talks about how, during the research process for “Braving the Wilderness”, she often felt like screaming, “Screw you and screw the pain of people who are causing pain. I will hold on to my sweet, self-righteous rage.” (pg 66)

“But to what end? [Clinging to rage and] Not caring about our own pain and the pain of others is not working? […] One response to this is “Get angry and stay angry!” I haven’t seen this advice borne out in the research What I have found is that yes, we all have the right and need to feel and own our anger. It’s an important human experience. And it’s critical to recognize that maintaining any level of rage, anger, or contempt (that favourite concoction of a little anger and a little disgust) over a long period of time is not sustainable.
“Anger is a catalyst. Holding onto it will make us exhausted and sick. Internalizing anger will take away our joy and spirit; externalizing anger will make us less effective in our attempts to create change and forge connection. It’s an emotion that we need to transform into something life-giving: courage, love, change, compassion, justice. […] [A]nger is a powerful catalyst, but a life-sucking companion.” (pg. 67-8)

Not responding in anger and hatred is hard; harder still when attacks hit close to home, metaphorically or geographically. Terrorism is meant to provoke fear; it’s meant to send a message of power and control, introducing a non-consensual power dynamic across a broad ideological system. Fighting back is as instinctive for some as accepting subjugation is for others, so where is the presumedly RIGHT “Us” in this mix, the one we join to stay safe?

The whole premise of Brown’s book is that in stepping outside these ideological camps to choose love over hate, and to transform anger into one of those life-sustaining alternates, we are braving our own individual, ideological wilderness. Embracing something other than UsAndThemis encampments is hard; it often feels like eschewing the safety of numbers for a unique position of disengagement from that anger and hatred. But as Leiris’ post and Brown’s research conclude, there’s a massive difference between disengagement on a systemic level, and choosing to lean in close and find the aspects of us as individuals that illustrate we’re more alike than we’re maybe comfortable admitting out loud. That illustrate that even amidst vast ideological differences, there ARE similarities of human experience in each of us to which we can relate. We may not WANT to; we may not CHOOSE to.

Brown herself admits there’s a safe harbour in staying angry and holding ourselves ideologically separate from those who hurt or anger us, who provoke us to fear and hatred. We join with others in our respective camps, believing in those superficial bonds of unified hate (in which one can argue the “Us” suddenly looks an awful lot like the “Them” we claim to despise for doing exactly the same thing). we buy into the entrenchment because, hey, safety in numbers, and we want to be in the Right Camp at the end of the day, yes?

Letting go of anger, stepping away from the entrenched encampments: this is the wilderness Brown explores. She quotes Dr. Maya Angelou:

“You are only free when you realize you belong no place–you belong every place–no place at all. The price is high. The reward is great.” (pg. 5)

And so… you will not have my hate.

I may be afraid. I may be angry, but I will not hate. I may not have explanations that make any sense at all, but I will not hate. I will practice leaning in close, leaning into the sharp things, and I will not hate.

You will NOT have my hate.

Community, Life Transitions, Self-Development, Uncategorized

A colleague of mine and I were reflecting recently on our respective middle-aged women clients who are grappling simultaneously with perimenopause, empty-nesting impacts on their intimate partnered relationships, job issues and the looming shadows of the second halves of their lives. Laurie commented that she was noticing women clients using this stage of their lives as a period of discernment. I figured I understood what she meant from the context of the discussion, but at the same time, “discenment” is more than just simple decision-making, so, being the Word Nerd that I am, it behooved me to both look at the word itself, and reconsider what I thought I was understanding about its deployment in the context of the discussion.

Turns out, there’s a lot more nuance to the word than my internal working definition of “a more in-depth analytical process underlying decision making”.

Discern, the verb:
1a: to detect with the eyes
b: to detect with senses other than vision
2: to recognize or identify as separate and distinct
3: to come to know or recognize mentally

Discernment, the noun:
1: the quality of being able to grasp and comprehend what is obscure
2: an act of perceiving or discerning something

Google definition of dis?cern?ment
1. the ability to judge well. “an astonishing lack of discernment”
2. (in Christian contexts) perception in the absence of judgment with a view to obtaining spiritual direction and understanding. “without providing for a time of healing and discernment, there will be no hope of living through this present moment without a shattering of our common life”

There are several aspects of these definitions that fascinate me in the context of applying the word to a midlife assessment process, especially such as I witness in women around me:

  • recognizing or identifying as separate and distinct
  • developing an ability to grasp and comprehend what is obscure
  • developing non-judgmental perspective with a view to obtaining direction and understanding (spiritual or otherwise)

The classic midlife crisis, as previously discussed, is most commonly seen as a catastrophic adjustment in relational and personal understanding. It’s a time when big changes occur, sometimes as knee-jerk reactions, and sometimes as calculated preaption responses. A friend of mine in a local service organization, told me recently that the single largest group of new members most service clubs take in annually are men in their 40s-50s. Service clubs report this being a confluence of factors, many of them tied to traditional masculine definition through actions, things men *DO*:

  • kids are older and more self-sufficient, or leaving/left home
  • more disposable time
  • more expendable income
  • a need to have “extracurricular activities” that look good padding out resumes for “C-Suite”-level executive or Board of Directors positions
  • a need to have something in place that will provide direction in terms of social and activity purposes after retirement (especially for candidates for early retirement)

Women, while they will also seek service club memberships for many of the same reasons at similar life stages, apparently don’t pursue these clubs in anything like the same numbers as men. The women to whom I’m exposed (personally and professionally) seem to see middle age as an opportunity or provocation for increasing self-reflection. It’s like we come of age and use our midlife point as the trigger to redefine what we know about who we are, why we are, what our lives mean to us as our bodies change out from under us in uncomfortable, unpleasant ways. Shifting from our “fertile years” into menopause means confronting a shift in our definition from Mother to… Crone, at a time when many of us still perceive ourselves as far from Old.

There has been a cultural shift as the Baby Boomers have aged into retirement that everything that happens from midlife on isn’t necessarily the death knell it once seemed to be. Retiring even at 65 means a significant stretch of life ahead of us, and 55 even more. Retiring men fret about what to do with their days, and as their boredom begins to blossom, they are frequently underfoot on the home front, or trying to assert some presence/input/control in the home sphere… and the women who have traditionally been the homesphere managers and controllers are increasingly finding they’ve Just Had Enough. These women are more commonly saying, “I just got done taking care of my kids, I’m damned well not going to take care of HIM now, too!”, but the process of watching their partners move from purposeful to less-purposeful lives is raising a lot of questions for themselves, too.

As I cooked dinner the other night, I thought about the women I had been talking to. They’re just entering, slogging through or just leaving their 40s. They belong to Generation X, born roughly during the baby bust, from 1965 to 1984, the Title IX babies who were the first women in their families to go to college. Or go away to college. Or to live on their own, launch a career, marry in their late 20s (or never) or choose to stay home with their children. They’re a Latina executive in California, a white stay-at-home mom in Virginia who grows her own organic vegetables, an African-American writer in Texas, an Indian-American corporate vice president who grew up in the suburbs of New York, and dozens more. They’re smart. They’re grateful for what they have. They’re also exhausted. Some of them are terrified. A few of them are wondering what the point is.

I called my best friend, a reporter a few years older than me who grew up in the Midwest. She has three children and lives on a quiet, leafy street in Washington, D.C., with her boyfriend. They recently adopted a dog.
“Hey,” I said, happy to have caught her on a break from her job, “do you know anyone having a midlife crisis I could talk to?”

The phone was silent for a second.

Finally, she said, “I’m trying to think of any woman I know who’s not.”
— Ada Calhoun, “The New Midlife Crisis: Why (and How) It’s Hitting Gen X Women”

Somewhere between the perimenopausal PHYSICAL transition and the retirement SOCIAL transitions, women are increasingly grappling with the destabilization, undermining, chaotic shifts in their identities. Middle-aged women suddenly find themselves social “invisible” in an extremely ageist culture. Menopause robs us of our identity as fertile creatures, menstruation being the one thing that sets us so far apart from men as to create unsurpassable gulfs in cross-gender comprehension; even those of us who never had or wanted children feels the shift as a curse we’ve been contending with since we were 12 or 13 first becomes wildly unpredictable, then disappears altogether. Most of us rejoice that absence, but the meaning, the impact of a self-descriptive, narrative level, is a different issue entirely. But it’s happening to women at a time when, on some societal levels, we’re just “coming into our own power” in our careers, at least in industries that allow equal advancement for all genders. Many of my friends experiencing perimenopause as they move up corporate ladders or across fields into other companies (or, in my case, across to another complete field) spin terrible, or terribly funny, tales of hot flashes and sweats or bouts of incontinence in meetings and interviews, or the disruptions of their personal AND professional relationships from hormonally-driven mood swings. We may be delighted to get past the symptomology, but things can often be as complicated afterwards when we’re left alone with the questions, “Well then… who *AM* I now?”

The discernment phase, then, is sparked by a multitude of shifts in a woman’s life. Men ask, “What do I *DO*?”; women ask, “What do I *MEAN*?” (…which is not to say they won’t also get to a point of also asking, “What do I do?”, but it’s not the typical starting point in a discernment process, rather more the outcome state as a result of the reflection).

Coming back to the three points that interested me, midlife individuation and differentiation mean a new opportunity for women to reconsider who they are inside or outside the family or group structures of their lives. They may find themselves examining their roles or functions within the relational partnership now that childcare is not the relationship’s primary focus. They may discover a lack of direction in their professional lives once their internal sense of meaning and purpose, especially if they are encountering any kind of glass ceiling effect in their chosen industry. What does it mean to be a “good employee” if any advancement path is limited by the very fact of their gender? What does it mean to be a woman in a world where these invisible boundaries and implicit expectations (from employers, colleagues, clients, families, and intimate partners alike) dictate what we’re PERMITTED to be? And what does it mean to be a woman “of a certain age” trying to function in a professional context when society in general is trying to render us invisible?

The discernment phase is one in which we as therapists see a lot of women “waking up” to a predicament of emptiness. The need to fill that emptiness is often what drives us into relationship in the first place, but over time, the relationship itself can become dissatisfying, disillusioned, disconnected. One of the questions either partner will often pose at this stage is, “Is it worth the work to effect repair and reconnection?” Men in therapy will often lament not understanding what it is their disconnected partner wants them to do; if they only know what to *DO*, they could do it, and everything will be all right. Women, however… it’s not about the doing, it’s about the hearing. Being effectively validated by a partner *MEANS* something significant to them; it tells them something about both their own value to the partner, and about the partner’s willingness to show that value, in ways that are substantially different than “If you tell me to just help out around the house more, that will make everything better, right?”

Wrong.

Ask a person in this stage of life, what is meaningful to them, and it might be an interesting experience to observe their reactions as they try to figure out what YOU mean, then try to figure out their answer. Ask a woman in the discernment phase, what is meaningful to her, and odds are good you may be the first person to have ever invited her to consider such esotericism. “My marriage, my kids.” Maybe, “My work.” Okay, so if we take away the ROLES of “Mom, Wife, Employee”, what’s left? Who is the person at the core of those roles, and what is meaningful to her? Marriages change into parallel lives rather than twined intimacy, kids grow up and (hopefully) move out, jobs may be less than satisfying. What, then, is left as our meaning in all of the space leftover?

Michael White‘s narrative therapy includes a process called a “definitional ceremony” that becomes useful, if not downright significant, to the community of women waking themselves up into this lengthy space and time of their lives, wondering what it’s all supposed to mean:

“These ceremonies are rituals that acknowledge and ‘regrade’ people’s lives in contrast to many rituals in contemporary culture that judge and degrade people’s lives. In many of these degrading rituals, people’s lives are measured against socially constructed norms, and they are judged to be inadequate, incompetent, disordered, and often a failure in terms of their identities. Definitional ceremonies provide people with the option of telling or performing the stories of their lives before an audience of carefully chosen outsider witnesses. […] It is not the place of outsider witnesses to form opinions, give advice, make declarations, or introduce moral stories or homilies. Rather, outsider witnesses engage one another in conversations about the expressions of the telling they were drawn to, about the images these expressions evoked, about the personal experiences that resonated with these expressions, and about their sense of how their lives have been touched by the expressions.
In these outsider witness retellings, what people give value to in their acts of living is re-presented in ways that are powerfully resonant and highly acknowledging. Additionally, it is through these retellings that people experience their lives as joined around shared and precious themes in ways that significantly thicken the counterplots of their existence.” — Michael White, Maps of Narrative Practice

White is addressing a particular psychotherapeutic practice, but this use of the outsider witnesses also speaks very strongly to the phenomenon many women in this discernment phase pursue in the course of developing their own “tribe” or social connections. Midlife transitions provide their own definitional rituals, even if most of them seem, from a broader cultural perspective, informal, unconscious, or covert. Often starting from looking for socio-emotional connection and forms of support not accessible through family or employment connections, this deliberate tribal development is a part of how women moving through conscious discernment begin to reshape their environment. These outsider witnesses become sounding boards, reflective surfaces and sanity checks. These tribes speak to helping develop that third point, the non-judgmental perspective; women moving into discernment don’t always have answers for self-defining questions, so their tribes become the safe spaces in which they work out their clarified values and direction. Sometimes the outsider witnesses include professional therapeutic support as well, and those in the discernment stage look to uncover what has possibly been obscured in their lives by “putting pieces together” from such diverse resources in new ways. In the office I visualize this as spilling a bag of children’s letter blocks onto a table, and moving the pieces around until we spell something that resonates with the client. Women in discernment stages are likewise seeking something, some kind of meaning or purpose that that resonates.

Martin Seligman, one of the founding fathers of the Applied Positive Psychology movement, suggests that meaning is a fundamental element of well-being, and that it is not strictly subjective in its value (Seligman, 2011). Likewise, he also suggests that “positive relationships” are also a critical component of well-being, so it becomes very unsurprising that when women — anyone, really — feel they are in an unsatisfying or unsupportive relationship, they seek to establish both positive relationships and meaning (subjective or objective) as a way of resetting themselves for the next stages of their lives. It’s no coincidence that the highest-growing age group experiencing divorce, then, is the 50+ age group.

Women in this discernment process are uncovering themselves: values and needs and dreams that have quite possibly been buried by relational expectations for their entire lives (family of origin, their own family units, social/cultural expectations and messaging, etc.). Chogyam Trungpa writes often about “awakening the sanity we are born with“, describing how we strip away these layers of messages and imposed values to uncover our authentic selves. Women have, in many ways, been doing this work in a less-well-documented way for generations; sometimes we’re privileged enough to be able to break free entirely from the obscuring structures imposed on us; sometimes we find effective ways of achieving discernment, redefinition, and renewed headings in personal development, within the context of our existing valued relationships. Sometimes we’re not free to make that scope of change, but we can think about who and how we are within those relationships in new ways, and perhaps shift how we chose to relate and operate inside those potentially-inescapable contexts. In doing so, potentially for the first times in conscious memory they are invited to see themselves as distinct entities from the systems in which they are members (implicitly or explicitly). And in seeing themselves as something both part-of-yet-distinct-from, there is also an invitation to consider HOW we operate within those systems: what is meaningful to each of US?

With women living longer, there is a lot more to life from “middle age” onward than historically women have been granted. It would be nice if we had better tools to prepare ourselves to enjoy that “second half” in spite of the physical and relational changes that normal life process force on us, but historically, we’re not well-armed. Discernment therefore remains a largely individualized, somewhat-haphazard phase without clear processes and direction. But more and more women in middle age, both peri- and post-menopause, are beginning conversations that render us less invisible to *each other*, at least. And in doing so, in finding more of these communities and relationships with other women in the same boat, we find meaning in the shared experiences, those aspects of our stories that resonate.

We are not alone. And that’s the biggest joy in this entire transitional phase. We are NOT alone.

Activism, Community, Grief, Politics

I went to my first public vigil tonight. So many times lately, as the Kitchener mayor so rightly pointed out, the city square has been used as a gathering place for mourning and sadness. It felt odd to be in the crowd, like I was crashing the funeral of someone I didn’t know (mostly true, in its own way) in some place I had at best dubious right to be. I’m not a Muslim. But I *am* Canadian, and I have been saying for almost two years that we are facing becoming victims of the same waves of hate that are sweeping the states; we’re not so far removed that the free license being granted in America to hatespeech and hatecrime, to the increasingly rapid erosion of human rights (how has it only been NINE DAYS?), isn’t beginning to show its ugly face here. We’re not immune. And as one angry white young man with a military-grade rifle showed last night to a mosque filled with Canadian citizens at prayer, we’re not safe.

Canada hasn’t had a shooting like that since the ?cole Polytechnique massacre in 1989, and while I was shocked, I was too young and too self-absorbed to really connect with what it meant to be singled out for some kind of minority, marginalized quality (in that case, being female) and to be gunned down just for being That One Thing. Even though I was a woman at a predominantly-engineering university myself, the same age as the victims. That one didn’t hit home nearly the same way, to my recollection. The Orlando shooting did, but I couldn’t get to the vigil, given the work schedule; I lit a candle in solidarity with the vigil, though, and sat all night with my queer clients as best I could. Last night it was Muslims, in a mosque that had already been targeted with hatecrime in the past year; tonight I had the convenience of a clear schedule, but beyond that, I felt like I needed to be there in support, for whatever my presence as a nameless face in the crowd might be worth to those who need it.

Tonight showed a strong crowd in the city square, a cultural mishmash as we expect Canadian cities to produce. We’re still so blind in our privilege, so falsely secure. I caught myself turning around at one point when I realized that, while I was responding to flashes going off from the balcony above us, what I was doing was scanning the skyline. I was actively looking for something that wasn’t there, that shouldn’t have been there, but that I was suddenly terrified might be. We’re Canadian. We just plain don’t know how to deal with that. I had a very vivid recollection when I realized I was looking for rooftop shooters; in 1999, when I was living in Rotterdam, I came across posters on the metro station walls one day that made me painfully aware that I was (relatively speaking) driving distance from the ACTIVE WAR ZONE that was Kosovo. Google tells me it’s a 24 hour drive, which is considerably more than I remember it being at the time, but recognizing abruptly that one is on the same continent, even a large-ish continent, as an active conventional war, without the comforting separation of vast oceanic bodies to create a safety buffer?that’s the feeling I had tonight. Proximal terror. It happened in Quebec City. At this point, there’s zero reason to stop it from happening here. Quebec City is only eight hours away by car; I know, I’ve done that drive a few times. That’s a helluva lot closer than Kosovo to Rotterdam.

I kept waiting for someone at the podium to talk about anger; they all spoke to sadness, some spoke to the hate behind the acts, many spoke to love. It wasn’t until Brice Balmer*, speaking for some kind of Interfaith collective in Cambridge IIRC, spoke of anger that I recognized I was waiting for someone to voice, and thereby validate, my own impotent rage. And maybe that’s why none of them did; they know way more about rage right now than I do, and if it seems impotent to them too, then their purpose becomes turning all that energy into something creative and sustaining. The shooter let hate and rage consume him. That is a path of madness and bitter brutality.

That is not my Canada. That isn’t the change I want to be in the world. And confronting my own rage is… well, at least it’s familiar. It’s something I have ample practice working with, for different reasons. Being told by those much closer to this grief that I am that it’s okay to let go of the anger and redirect the energy into love and supporting “diversity not division”, to building bridges instead of walls, to getting to know my community and those vulnerable facets huddled to the outside… that helped, once I was ready to hear them. The rage has its place, but it cannot be the fuel. The energy, yes; the emotion, no.

So once I get my own house in order, metaphorically speaking, I begin the work of reaching out ? no, not “out to”, not this time, but rather, “reaching into” ? my community to see where I can be of service. I have energy to offer, and compassion. I can work with people to help teach them how to separate emotion from energy, intent from action, and where owning the point of their own decisions becomes paramount in understanding why we would ever want to choose hate over love. I’ll do that work on myself first, because I’m a big proponent of “Physician, heal thyself”, then extend it to anyone who wants to have that conversation with me in and out of the counselling room. Where I can take it beyond that remains to be seen.

I can only dream this may be the last time we have to gather in grief this way. There is *so much* work to be done now, but it’s this or sit back and watch the world burn, and tonight I learned that I just can’t do that. I don’t WANT to do that.

As a Canadian, as a woman, as a member of my communities… I want to be better than that.

(*?Brice was also my Addictions professor at the seminary, the catalyst behind the branch of my path that led to my working therapeutically with those who have offended sexually.)